“If you ask me who I am, my first response is I am my mother’s daughter”

These are the words of Meg Whitman straight from her campaign video. Meg is running for Governor of California. She just won the GOP primary and will be facing Jerry Brown, the California Attorney General who is running a campaign based on his frugal ways (in comparison to Meg’s prodigal spending). Meg’s campaign is based on her leadership skills, years of being a powerful executive, and “cleaning up the mess those politicians have made in Sacramento.” Family is also important for Meg, which is why her two sons must be such a disappointment to her. On her campaign site, Meg mentions her Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum sons Will and Griff:

Meg has committed her energy, her trademark optimism and her belief in fiscal restraint to the challenge of rebuilding California. She has done so with the full support of her family, which is her greatest source of pride. Meg and her husband, Griff, a neurosurgeon at Stanford Hospital, have been married for nearly 30 years. Their two sons are now young adults. Meg and her family are ardent outdoor enthusiasts who love hiking, skiing, fly fishing and enjoying all of California’s natural treasures. “If we let California fail, we all fail,” she says. “And we love California too much to let it fail. We have to work together to make it the place of our dreams again.”

Cute! Her family is going to help her save California from failing! If only her sons could have figured out how not to fail Princeton, get kicked out of boarding schools, and shroud momma’s campaign in the kind of wealthy entitlement we all love to hate. First there was son Griff Harsh V. With such a pretentious, hoity-toity name, can Griffy really be blamed for this alleged quote which Gawker picked up after Griff got suspended from Princeton for a year?

Then there’s Will Harsh I. Gawker, ever the Ivy-obsessives, found this out from a tip:

Griff’s non-refundable membership to Cottage [eating club] was paid in full when he got suspended. So some of the officers would let Will attend some meals and formals events in his brother’s place until Will got banned from there.

The story goes that Will yelled “what are all these niggers doing here” one night when all the members of the Black Arts Company where there to celebrate a show they had performed. Cottage is know as one of the whiter clubs on campus so I assume that he was shocked to see so many black people there in a night. He was already on notice with Cottage officers because of an altercation he started with a bouncer early in the year.

Guest-of-a-guest got this equally rumor-based tip about Will:

“He’s just a tool. He was banned from at least one eating club for calling a girl a racial slur. He would pride himself on having several ‘girlfriends’ at one time, and tried unsuccessfully to be a player. He was actually independent (not in an eating club) which I always assumed was because no one wanted him or he was banned. OH and I almost forgot about the time he refused to introduce a girlfriend to his family because she was Jewish, and didn’t meet his standards of intellect. He may have thrown in fat, too. I can’t remember. Really classy.”

Okay. These seem like pretty gossipy rumors, but these stories seem all too indicative of what kind of people Meg Whitman’s sons are. And then, pardon our frequent Gawker references, there’s this possibility that Meg (who is the fourth richest woman in California) is actually getting campaign donors to pay Tweedle Dee (Griff)’s allowance through a mysterious payment to Solamere, a private equity firm that Whitman’s campaign has paid close to $96,000 in the past four months. Interesting. Because Griff used to ‘work’ at Solamere as an ‘analyst’ according to an old Linkedin profile:

Would it really be that out of character for former eBay CEO, current billionare Meg? Well, there was the time she donated $30 million in her name to help build the new Whitman residential college. Of course, according to Meg, it was all for her love of Princeton and excitement to be able to expand the school by 500 students. Or maybe it was just so she could convince Princeton to admit one student: Griff would be applying to Princeton just two years after donation, just in time to live in freshly built Whitman College. Griff had supposedly been kicked out of boarding schools before getting to Princeton, so a little $30 million nudge from Princeton board member mom probably couldn’t have hurt his application.

How will Meg hide her boys from yelling racial slurs or pointing out the obvious fact that they’re richer than most people out there on the campaign trail? Whitman’s alreadygetting criticized for unnecessary spending on the campaign trail, but maybe paying them off or buying them a job would do the trick.

If you know anything further about Will or Griff Harsh (who have pretty amazing internet hiding skills) please send an email to the tip line!

I have been on the receiving end of Griff V's bad manners…I'm an acquaintance of his mother's and he treated me extremely rudely. I know for a fact that he had to take a year off from Princeton because he committed 3 major violations, the last involving drugs. I also know Will and he is skating rather close to the edge as well, but he does not have his older brother's mean disposition. Both of these boys were raised by a succession of young au-pairs instead of a properly qualified nanny, and the lack of parental involvement in their young lives has caught up with them. Dad the brain surgeon and Mom the CEO put their careers ahead of their children, with unfortunate consequences.

As someone diagnosed with mild Aspergers, I would say that Will’s behavior doesn’t seem typical of AS. Saying that he probably has it is an insult to the rest of us who don’t draw attention to ourselves in this negative way.

By the way, TFC, you spend a long paragraph defending him but 3 posts earlier you say:
“Absolutely true post. Can’t wait till his mom see’s this one, wonder if she will send him to rehab…again.”

Will Harsh had made his debut in the Princeton community as a huge douche before even arriving on campus. On the Princeton Class of 2011 facebook group, he posted things like, “I'm going to sit on the porch of TI shooting fags and liberals with a BB gun.” He showed great leadership, initiating a thread called something like “So any barons, earls, or kings?” When others wrote things like “Well, my last name means 'king' in German,” he responded, “I'm American royalty. My mom's the shit” (though once we got on campus, I heard him call his mother a bitch several times). On a discussion thread about the freshman 15, he told one Asian girl, “Fat Asian chicks are hot. More cushion for the pushin.”

Can any other p11-ers who remember his facebook presence (now, of couse, carefully deleted) on the 2011 group please back me up?

P11, my name is Nate Schweber and I’m helping out with some reporting about the Whitmans for The Bay Citizen, a news organization in San Francisco. I wanted to talk to some people who knew Griff and/or Will, and it sounds like you do. Could you drop me a line? nateschweber@gmail.com Thanks.

Look, I know 30 large is not an insignificant piece of change but for crissakes P is a wealthy school. Can't you just write a check to his ugly fatass mother and tell her come out to NJ and retrieve her skidmark of a son. The other douchebag offspring graduated but P shouldn't allow it to happen a second time. Time for P to regain some self respect and stop being donation whores. You guys are an embarassment to the Ivy League.

Wow, what an eye opener! I thought I had been following the California campaign for governor fairly closely. But this stuff throws a whole new light on Meg Whitman the person. Kids don’t get to be this ugly without some real help from their parents.

It’s so nice to see Meg Whitman’s bid to buy the governorship of California in the toilet where her disingenuous campaign belongs. The settlement arrived at for assaulting the eBay employee that she attacked, unfortunately, was not enough for the injured woman to retire on the way Meg Whitman did after enriching herself on the backs of everyone else.

Unconditional Raves

IvyGate has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Observer, Newsweek, New Yorker, and other publications, as well as NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Drudge Report, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Wonkette, Jezebel, The Awl, and many more. Most are horrified.